Performance Factors for Session Communications

This topic describes factors that drive or affect performance for session communications deployments.

Depending on your deployment, your agents can be handling phone calls (Siebel CTI), email messages (Siebel Email Response), chat messages, work items of other communications channels, or a combination of these.

• Inbound calls processed per hour. The number of inbound calls (or other types of work items) processed per hour (or some other time period) by your communications infrastructure.

• Outbound calls processed per hour. The number of outbound calls processed per hour (or some other time period) by your communications infrastructure. (For outbound predictive dialer calls, only the calls that are answered and processed by Communications Server are relevant here.)

• Number of user communications actions per minute (load). The average number of communications-related user actions per minute, and the average think time between such user actions. Communications-related actions typically refers to actions performed using the communications toolbar.

  Longer think times mean less load on the Siebel database and the Siebel Server. Think time is an important factor in overall system load. Estimation of think time must approximate actual user usage. For more information about think time and Siebel Application Object Manager tuning, see Chapter 3, "Tuning the Siebel Application Object Manager for Performance."

• Number of concurrent communications users (agents). The number of concurrent users of session communications features (typically, contact center agents). This figure will be some percentage of the total number of concurrent users on the Siebel Application Object Manager.

  You also need to understand how agents work with these features, the average number of inbound and outbound work items per agent, and how these factors relate to your organization's service goals. Some agents receive a large number of work items from ACD queues or initiate a large number of work items. Supervisors or other users can be defined as agents but might receive only escalated work items, for example. For more information about concurrent users and Siebel Application Object Manager tuning, see Chapter 3, "Tuning the Siebel Application Object Manager for Performance."

• Volume of customer data. The total volume of customer data. Data volume affects how quickly data can be retrieved for various purposes, such as to perform lookups for screen pops, route work items, or populate the customer dashboard. In many cases, data volume directly affects response times seen by agents. The volume of data must be realistic and the database must be tuned to reflect real-world conditions.

These and many other factors (such as the average call time, average time between calls for an agent, and so on) will affect system performance as experienced by contact center agents. An agent will be concerned with general response time, screen pop response time, and other perceived measures of performance.

Third-Party Product Considerations

Review information presented in applicable third-party documentation for any requirements that affect your deployment. For example:

• Some CTI middleware software might place limitations on the number of agents that can be served at a single contact center site.

• Integration with ACD queues, predictive dialers, or other modules can affect your configurations, affect network traffic, or have other impacts.

• The capacity of your telephony link (between the ACD switch and the CTI middleware) can affect performance.